Due to the on-going miniaturization of electrical components and the general advancement of technology, the thermal management of high heat fluxes is becoming a pivotal requirement for power electronic devices. Although conventional heat pipes have proved to be effective for cooling, their functionality at very high heat fluxes is limited by their form factor and operational limits.
These limitations have been partially overcome by a different cooler type, the pulsating heat pipe (PHP), introduced by Akachi et al. (Akachi H., Polàšek F. and Štulc P., Pulsating Heat Pipes, Proc. 5th Int. Heat Pipe Symp., Melbourne, 1996, 208-217) and described in EP 2 444 770 A1. The pulsating heat pipe has, as a basic structure, a Pulsating Heat Pipe circuit system with a different tube geometry than a conventional heat pipe, reflecting the fundamentally different transport principle for the working fluid, to be described in more detail below.
However, even when cooling is performed by a pulsating heat pipe-based cooling device, there remains a need to obtain still higher power densities and a more compact configuration.